But these your friends and children, to whose hands Committed in the silent night you rose And took your last faint steps— These led you down, O great American, Down to the winter night and the white beach; And there you saw that the huge hull that waited Was not as are the boats of the other dead, Frail craft for a light passage; But first of a long line of towering ships, Storm-worn and Ocean-weary every one, The ships you launched, the ships you manned, the ships That now, returning from their sacred quest With the thrice-sacred burden of their dead, Lay waiting there to take you forth with them, Out on the flood-tide, to some farther quest. LA FOLLE DU LOGIS Wild wingèd thing, O brought I know not whence To beat your life out in my life’s low cage; You strange familiar, nearer than my flesh Yet distant as a star, that were at first A child with me a child, yet elfin-far, And visibly of some unearthly breed; Mirthfullest mate of all my mortal games, Yet shedding on them some evasive gleam Of Latmian loneliness—O even then Expert to lift the latch of our low door And profit by the hours when, dusked about By human misintelligence, we made Our first weak fledgling flights— Divine accomplice of those perilous-sweet Low moth-flights of the unadventured soul Above the world’s dim garden!—now we sit After what stretch of years, what stretch of wings, In the same cage together—still as near And still as strange! Only I know at last That we are fellows till the last night falls, And that I shall not miss your comrade hands Till they have closed my lids, and by them set A taper that—who knows?—may yet shine through. Sister, my comrade, I have ached for you, Sometimes, to see you curb your pace to mine, And bow your Maenad crest to the dull forms Of human usage; I have loosed your hand And whispered: “Go! Since I am tethered here”; And you have turned, and breathing for reply: “I too am pinioned, as you too are free,” Have caught me to such undreamed distances As the last planets see, when they look forth To the sentinel pacings of the outmost stars— Nor these alone, Comrade, my sister, were your gifts. More oft Has your impalpable wing-brush bared for me The heart of wonder in familiar things, Unroofed dull rooms, and hung above my head The cloudy glimpses of a vernal moon, Or all the autumn heaven ripe with stars.